Chapter Fifteen
Thething, if it had been done on the stage, would have ended there. The climax had come. It was—it should have been—all over. But the drama of life, if it holds climax, inevitably leads straight on to anticlimax. Things go on ... one can’t pause, as at the end of a chapter, and take things up again after a decent interval.
The catastrophe was followed by a series of days and nights that had to be lived through.
Harter’s trial came on in a very short while and he was found guilty of manslaughter.
He got five years for it.
They said that he smiled at the verdict.
Sallie and Martyn Ambrey both went away from home on the day following that of the inquest. One could feel in both of these young and yet highly evolved people the strong, instinctive resistance with which they opposed the possible effect of tragedy upon themselves. They were afraid of being made to feel emotion, and yet they were afraid, too, offinding themselves out to be incapable of emotion. They hurried away from Cross Loman.
In a little while, I imagine that the whole thing will have become purely objective to both of them, a story to be told, something entirely outside themselves.
Claire, with her powers of imagination, suffered vicariously, but as usual she mixed it all up with her own private and peculiar grievances. Several times she asked why Bill, who was young and had all life before him should have been taken, while she herself, for whom life held nothing, and who was infinitely weary, should have been left?
There is, of course, no answer to that kind of questions. I never quite understand why people ask them.
Lady Annabel Bending, who would certainly get out of her pony cart and walk up the mildest slope in order to spare her fat pony, made, on the whole, the most brutal comment of any that I heard made, in her gentle, relentless voice. She said:
“I suppose that woman is satisfied, now that she’s succeeded in causing the death of a young and talented man, after mixing him up in a vulgar scandal and doing her best to ruin him, body and soul, and bringing her husband to disgrace. I suppose she’s satisfied.”
She said this to me, but Mary Ambrey was in theroom. She looked at Lady Annabel with her straight-gazing dark eyes.
“However much Mrs. Harter may be responsible for—and, after all, she wasn’t the only person concerned in the affair—it’s she who’s been left to face the music,” said Mary. “As for being satisfied, Lady Annabel, it’s a figure of speech in any case, I suppose, but it doesn’t apply to Mrs. Harter. If she’d broken every Commandment there is, she’d be paying for it now—over and over again.”
Lady Annabel did not look pleased. No doubt there was an obscure connection in her mind between the Ten Commandments and the Rector’s official position.
“My words were, of course, not meant to be taken literally,” she said. “Probably Mrs. Harter is shocked at what has happened, now, as we are all apt to be shocked by consequences when they are sufficiently serious and unexpected. But I must say I have very little pity for a woman who deliberately sets out to wreck the life of a man younger than herself.”
Mary turned rather white, but she had the courage to say:
“Bill Patch was a free agent. Apart from everything else, we ought to remember that he was a freeagent. It’s she who’s left to pay the penalty, but it isn’t fair that she should bear the blame for both.”
And then Claire said, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”
So far as surface values went, it was a rebuke to Mary. But Mary’s values are not surface ones, and she is quite clear-headed about them. And I believe that Claire herself, in a way, understood better than she would let herself appear to understand. She has far too much intuition not to know that Bill and Mrs. Harter had been involved, together, in an adventure of real spiritual and emotional significance, and that it was Bill who had been allowed the easy way out and Mrs. Harter who, as Mary said, had been left to face the music alone.
Claire understood, to a certain extent. But she had always disliked Mrs. Harter, and it was not in her to accord to a woman she disliked the recognition of spiritual and emotional significance.
Lady Annabel, who bent her head in acquiescence to the “de mortuis” clause, was on another plane of vision altogether. She reallycouldn’tsee any but the surface values.
Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter had sinned; and she was quite prepared to judge and condemn them both. But Captain Patch was dead, and so he could no more be spoken of except with pity and regret. Mrs.Harter, who was still alive, retained full responsibility for everything.
“It is a frightful affair altogether,” said Lady Annabel, “to have caused the death of a young man like that, in the very midst of the errors into which she had led him, without any time for preparation.... Well, I suppose she is satisfied now.”
Even Mary did not again attempt to move her from that.
The Kendals, who will undoubtedlyparler pour ne rien direround the whole subject at frequent intervals for the rest of their lives, nevertheless showed a great deal of warm feeling, so that one felt their narrow-mindedness to be oddly neutralized by their kindheartedness.
They had been fond of Bill Patch, and the girls, at least, in their strangely prolonged youthfulness of outlook, had never seen beyond the “flirtation-with-a-married-woman” indictment. Mumma herself, in all sincerity, cried heartily and said that in the grave all things were forgotten.
It will be no thanks to her if they are, however. She will always see the whole thing in terms of a sensational scandal, and it is thus that she will always show it to others. And in the end it is quite probable that the four Kendal girls will dismiss the subject, intheir rather solemn way, by the formula: “Mumma says she would rather that we did not talk about it.”
The lowest level of all was that upon which Mr. and Mrs. Leeds took—it could scarcely be called their stand, but their very fleeting and transitory foothold.
When they had accorded to death the conventional tributes of an instant of seriousness, a hastily-made-up face of shocked dismay, and a meaningless ejaculation or two, they were inclined to facetiousness.
They enjoyed the scandal of it all with that instinctive vulgarity of outlook that characterizes a certain type of unimaginative mind.
Leeds told the cocktail story over and over again and Mrs. Leeds chaffed him publicly about having admired “that woman” in Egypt. Away from Cross Loman probably they magnified their acquaintance with Mrs. Harter, wherever the notoriety of her name had penetrated, into an intimacy. Leeds, in particular, was like that.
Mrs. Fazackerly, to whom, after all, the shock of the accident had been a double one, behaved very gallantly. She attended the inquest, and she actually saw the father of Bill Patch and talked with him about his son. Neither of them referred to Mrs. Harter at all. Then Mrs. Fazackerly put Loman Cottage into the hands of the house agents, stored all her belongingsand came to us. Claire, who is at her best in a crisis, went herself to fetch her. The last of her opposition to Christopher’s marriage went by the board when poor Nancy, her final responsibilities over, had a bad nervous breakdown.
Claire nursed her.
“Poor little thing,” said Claire. “Women who have never really suffered are very apt to go to pieces when the first contact with reality comes. I could never do that myself. One is as one’s made, of course. I suppose that very few women of my years have been called upon to go through all that I have gone through in my life. But I’ve never broken down yet. If I had, I suppose that I should have gone mad by this time.”
She did not make that speech in front of Christopher, and her care of Nancy was rewarded by Christopher’s rather inarticulate, but quite evident, gratitude and admiration.
As soon as possible, Christopher Ambrey and Mrs. Fazackerly were married, very quietly indeed, in London, and he took her away to the South of France.
He was to rejoin his regiment abroad early in the following year, and she, of course, was going with him.
The last thing she said to me—and her childlike eyes regained their radiance as she said it—was:
“It’s the most wonderful chance of beginning life all over again that anyone was ever given. The things that used to worry me need never worry me again, and I shan’t ever be frightened any more.”
And with that—the last reference that I ever heard her make to the past—one felt that the old ghosts of those oft-quoted rages of Fazackerly, thrower of plates, and the tyrannies of old Carey, and his eternal criminological discussions, were laid for ever. Even the rather strenuous economies that had for so long been part and parcel of life at Loman Cottage melted away of themselves in Nancy’s determination that Christopher should be as happy as she was herself.
As far as I know, both of them continue to be happy, in their own way, and according to their own capacity for happiness.
They will be a great deal abroad, for some years to come, and Claire is gradually turning the battery of her correspondence on to Nancy instead of Christopher. Nancy’s replies are far more adequate than Christopher’s ever were.
“In the end,” says Sallie, “she’ll get on better with cousin Claire than anybody. Far better than any really thoroughly truthful person could ever do.”
It is all, in a way, very like the old literary conventionof the good people getting married and living happily ever after and the bad ones coming to smash.
And yet there is another way of looking at it—Mary Ambrey’s way.
It was after Martyn and Sallie had gone away, after Christopher’s marriage, and after I had been abroad with Claire for nearly nine weeks. Mary had remained in Cross Loman. It was a very warm spring day, and I had driven her up Loman Hill to the crossroads. The pony stopped of his own accord and turned round, and we looked at the distant hills and the red church tower. It was then that Mary told me she could never come there any more without thinking, with a vividness of thought that amounted to pain, of Mrs. Harter and of Captain Patch.
“Neither can I,” said I.
“The first—no, it was the second—walk that they took together was to this place.”
“Yes. How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“Diamond Harter?”
“Yes,” said Mary.
“I didn’t know that she had ever told anybody anything.”
“It was the only time that she ever did, I think,and nobody else knows that—I went down to Queen Street the day of the inquest.”
“Did you, Mary?”
“I wasn’t the only one,” she said quickly. “After the accident, do you remember that they’d taken her to the cottage hospital and she was detained there till the very day of the inquest? Two or three other people asked for her then, I know—the Rector, and Nancy Fazackerly, and, I think, Mrs. Leeds.”
I ejaculated at the last name.
“Yes, I know,” said Mary. “Of course that was horrible—but she refused to see the Rector, too, and Nancy.”
“So I should have expected.”
“I don’t know. The Rector is very gentle, and she’s known him for years—and he was very fond of Bill Patch. But, anyhow, she didn’t see either of them. As far as I know, she saw nobody except the doctor and one nurse until she gave her evidence. And after that, Miles, she had to go back to Queen Street.”
“And you went to find her there?”
“Oh no, I didn’t. She found me there. I can’t exactly explain what made me do it, Miles. I think—stupidly enough—it was the thought of her packing. I couldn’t get it out of my head that after the whole appalling business was over she’d have to come andsee all the clothes she’d been wearing, and the little, inanimate things, and the sitting room with the bow window, where she’d waited for Bill. And I thought that it would be less frightful if she found someone there and the packing done—and even if it made her very angry, it would be better than seeing it all again just exactly as it had been before. But she wasn’t angry. She came much sooner than I’d expected and walked straight into the sitting room, and I don’t think she remembered who I was or anything. She sat down by the table, I remember, and folded her hands in her lap and never said a word. And I finished the packing.”
“Without speaking?”
Mary nodded.
“I was crying, Miles. I didn’t know that onecouldcry like that any more—at my age. But if you’d seen her face—”
She broke off, and then after a minute or two spoke again.
“If the people, like Lady Annabel or General Kendal, who talked about her having done so much harm, and wrecked Bill’s life, and so on, could have seen her then, surely they’d have realized that she was paying for everything—over and over again. There’s nothing anyone can say of her that she can’t have said toherself—you see, she’s intelligent, isn’t she? She knew what she’d done far better than any of them could ever tell her. That’s the point of the whole thing, really, isn’t it? Mrs. Harter was capable of things, good as well as bad, that the rest of us didn’t even begin to apprehend. If the Kendals—I’m using them as a symbol, you understand—if the Kendals think that she was ‘unhappy’ and it served her right, it’s only because they attach such a trivial meaning to the word. I saw her once when she was happy, out with him one morning, long before we really knew anything about her and Bill—and I can’t forget it. Her emotions were in a different plane from those of the rest of us. Her capacity for feeling was different—I suppose it was really that which we all felt about her in the very beginning, when we discussed her. Life must always have been much more difficult for her than for most people—and yet all the time, one knows, it might have been so much more beautiful.”
“Do you really believe that?”
I was remembering Mrs. Harter’s sullen, contemptuous expression, her ungracious manner, even that characteristic middle-class phraseology, those intonations and inflexions that placed her, so unmistakably, in the aristocratic judgments of Cross Loman—
After all, I had never seen her, as Mary had, illuminated.
“Do you really think that Mrs. Harter’s life might have been something—beautiful?”
“Might have been?” said Mary. “It ought to have been. Sometimes I’m not even sure, Miles, that it won’t yet be, in spite of everything. She’s got it in her.”
Mary stopped—not hesitating, but giving additional weight to her low, earnest speech.
“Mrs. Harter is capable of tragedy—that’s why it came to her, I suppose. The majority of people aren’t.”
I found that I rather resented that remark of Mary’s. It was so true—the last half of it, I mean. Inevitably, I made the personal application that Mary had certainly not intended.
No, my warped, fretful, sometimes rather spiteful outlook on life does not constitute tragedy, any more than does the flat, jarring inharmony of the relations between Claire and myself. My futile repinings, all of them translated into terms of mental values, are not tragedy.
For a moment I wondered about Mary Ambrey herself. I looked at her and she smiled.
“Oh no, Miles. One may be conscious of havingmissed actual, positive happiness, perhaps, even, of having lost the power of feeling anything very vehemently, but that’s disappointment, not tragedy. All I’m capable of is of recognizing it when I see it.”
“And you saw it in Mrs. Harter?”
“Yes.”
“Mary, where is she now? What happened when you had packed for her in the lodgings in Queen Street?”
“She went to London, but I don’t know where she is now. I asked her where she was going and she said, ‘London first, to get a job. Abroad, I expect.’ There wasn’t anything I could do to help her, she said. She went away that night. I went to the station with her. And on the way there she talked a little, though I don’t think she had much idea of whom she was talking to at the time. She spoke about Bill, and she said quite calmly: ‘One reason why I’m telling you about it is that it will help me to remember it longer. One day all this will fade away—I know that very well. One’s made like that. What it’s done to me will stay, but the memory ofthis—even of him—will grow dim, like everything else. This torture will stop, in time, and I shall remember less and less.’ Then she told me about her second meeting with Bill. They went up Loman Hill and came here. She knew he’dfallen in love with her, of course—I imagine that quite a lot of men have been in love with her—and she half thought it was different to anything else that had ever happened to her before, but she wasn’t absolutely certain. You know, Miles, personally, I think it was rather wonderful that she should have recognized that—that quality when it did come. I don’t think anything in her life had helped to make her able to recognize it.
“So she told him about herself—the truth, not the subtle dramatization of it that one mostly offers to other people—I don’t mean that she had any special revelation to make, you know. But she just let him see her as she honestly saw herself—and she’s an extraordinarily honest woman. And she said Bill understood. She said that he asked what difference that made, at the end of it all. Can’t you hear Bill saying that, very literal, and serious, and gentle, and looking at her through those queer, thick glasses?”
For a minute, as Mary spoke, something caught hold of me, and I passed through one of those vivid moments of almost intolerable intuition in which one lives imaginatively through the profound emotional experience of another.
The compensatory reaction followed, as it always does.
“Even if the quality of which you speak were really there, in the link between those two people—and I’m inclined, too, to think that itwasthere—haven’t you ever wondered what would have become of them—of their love itself, if Bill had lived? Everything was against them—everything was there to divide them—difference of age, class, traditions, outlook. Those things are bound to count in the long run. Can you see Bill and Diamond Harter together in twenty—even in ten years’ time?”
“I don’t think they’d have been together,” said Mary quietly. “As it happened, the thing was arbitrarily settled for them—but if Bill had lived, they would have had to make a decision, and I don’t think they’d have decided to go away together. Bill said once—not to me, to Nancy—that he knew it would be an—unsporting—thing to do.”
I think she saw, although I said nothing, that, to my captiousness, the word came as something of an anticlimax. It suggested bathos.
“As she so often does,” Mary replied to my unspoken comment.
“That’s the idiom of Bill’s generation, isn’t it? An earlier one spoke of ‘honor’ and one earlier still of the Ten Commandments. I can’t imagine Bill or Mrs. Harter taking the Commandments, as such, veryseriously—can you? The form in which that ideal has been cast is out of date. But the ideal is still there. Personally, I think they would have subscribed to it—in their own way.”
“Translated into the terms of the football field,” said I coldly.
“If you like,” Mary agreed, unruffled. “Although Bill doesn’t suggest that particular association to my mind in the very least.”
Nor to mine—as she well knew.
“What has happened to Mrs. Harter?” I asked, not caring to pursue the other issue just then.
“I don’t know. She’s quite clever enough to have found a job, and kept it, if she wanted to.”
“If—yes. But what about all the years since her marriage—Egypt, and the dances, and the cocktails, and the men who fell in love with her—you remember the stories that fellow Leeds told us?”
“She won’t go back to that. Bill spoiled all that for her, you know. And, anyway, she has no money now, has she?”
“Harter?”
“She isn’t going to see him again.”
“She’s deserted him?”
“If you care to put it like that, yes. I suppose one can say he’s been sent to prison and when he comesout he’ll not find his wife. She’s deserted him. But, on the other hand, she would also have ‘deserted’ him if he hadn’t been sent to prison at all. It isn’t because he’s gone to prison that she’s left him. I don’t know why I tell you these things in so many words, Miles. You know them as well as I do, really.”
I did, of course. Perhaps, like Claire, I understood more about Mrs. Harter than I actually wanted to understand.
She remains, to me, entirely unforgettable. I think of her when I go down Queen Street past the hideous bow window, set in yellow bricks, at which she sat and watched for Bill Patch. I think of both of them when I go up Loman Hill and turn round at the crossroads to look over the gate under the big beech tree. Again and again I find myself wondering where she is now and whether she will ever come back to Cross Loman.
Mary says that she never will.
No one has heard from her, no one knows whether she is alive or dead. The charitable Lady Annabel once murmured a suggestion to the effect that “that infamous woman” would, no doubt, have changed her name, discarding the one which she had covered “with enduring shame.”
I disagree with Lady Annabel first and last. I cannotimagine Mrs. Harter changing her name, even though it belongs to her husband, and I do not consider that she has “covered it with enduring shame.” These phrases....
The personality of Diamond Harter outweighs them all and leaves one confronted only with a sense of stark tragedy.
And that, to my mind, remains the last word in the case. Tragedy, one of the rarest things in the world, came into our midst, and came through the only two people capable of tragedy. Most of us, as a matter of fact, did not even recognize it. The Leeds couple saw a scandal agreeably shocking and terrible, the Kendals saw folly, and impropriety, and the sad, sad death of one of the few young men of their acquaintance, Lady Annabel saw outraged laws and well-merited retribution, Sallie and Martyn Ambrey saw themselves seeing a very interesting psychological study—and so on.
The affair of Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter was all of those things, was fitted by all those labels. But they miss the essence of it, as labels always do.
I am constantly reminded, odiously, and against every æsthetic canon, of a homely French saying:A bon chat, bon rat.
I know of no dignified equivalent that can convey that implication.
We translate life in terms of our own inner values ... and Bill and Mrs. Harter were capable of tragedy, and it came to them, and most of us condemned them, and some of us only pitied.
It is over, and yet it will never be over. It continues to live, in the personality of Diamond Harter, and, indeed, in the personalities of us all.
THE END